Extracted from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod". This bit touches upon what is possibly my favourite piece of artwork ever. Possibly my favourite piece of art ever. But I'm biased as will be apparent if you read on...
May 5th
Link Davis-Trucker from Tennessee-Starday
single
I know nothing
about Link Davis except for this rockabilly single issued on the Starday label
in 1956.
I do know that this song is all about Elvis when he worked as a truck
driver for the Crown Electric Company, and therefore gets me a route into
writing about an artist who I haven’t got on the iPod;but really should.
I may have
tangentially touched upon Elvis somewhere along the line a bit earlier, but I
can’t honestly write for a year about popular music without having a bit of
Elvis in here. There’s some great artists and some hugely influential artists
and astoundingly innovative artists, but how many are true giants, towering
over the past half century and more?
He touched so many lives, both ordinary
individuals and fellow artists, and even now, his shadow hangs over popular
culture in so many ways.
I’ve had a bit
of a chequered history regarding Elvis, and it’s only been in the past 15 years
or so that I’ve gradually come to realise not only how important he was, and
is, but really how good he was.
Being so much into music for so long it was if
Elvis was always there, but I was sort of dismissive-there seemed to be no
relevance to me. I would have no sooner bought an Elvis record in the 70’s and
80’s, when I was heavily into punk and post-punk than I would have voted for
the Tories or taken up hangliding. It just didn’t seem to be anywhere on the
radar.
The well-known songs were so well-known that it was as if they’d always
been there. I didn’t not like them, it was just ambivalence. They were as
(un)important to me as, say, a James Last box set advertised in the back pages
of a Sunday paper. So what, it’s just Elvis.
On top of that, the only other
exposure to Elvis were re-runs of his cheesy films from the 60’s that would be
shown on daytime TV-I guess simply to use up a bit of airtime. I recall
watching his 1968 effort, “Speedway”, about NASCAR which co-starried Bill Bixby
one Wednesday afternoon when I had time on my hands. Bill Bixby and
NASCAR. Nothing more needs to be said. I
also had a perception-now totally wrong-of an inherent naffness of the “Fat
Elvis” Vegas years.
There were,
thankfully, a number of gradual turning points which have brought me to the
point where I am today in understanding the greatness of the man. I think that
they all happened at roughly the same time, and although there may have been
other influences coming to bear on me these are the main three.
Firstly, as a
birthday present for me when she was about 4 years old, Amy, my daughter, saved
up her pocket money and bought me an Elvis compilation. “The 50 Greatest
Hits”.Now, by any standards, this is a
brilliant collection which starts with “That’s All Right “and “Mystery Train”
and has 48 other fantastic songs. However,
because it was a present and because the way it was bought, I would have loved
it anyway (unless she’d got me a Sisters of Mercy album-that would have been
inexcusable). About two weeks after she got it for me, she accidently broke the
jewel case and unbeknown to me, sat and made her own cover to rectify it,
thinking that a new sleeve would make it better. This is my favourite piece of
art ever-it beats anything done by DaVinci, Warhol, Picasso, you name it. I
decided at the start of writing this year not to have any pictures or photos in
this but I’ll make an exception…
The second
factor was a random sort of purchase of the second volume of the classic
biography of Elvis by Peter Guralnick, “Careless
Love”. I’d read his 1971 book about the blues and knew he was a brilliant
writer. I read excellent reviews of the first volume anyway and thought that if
he’d spent so much effort writing about Elvis then there must be something
there. Not only that, but it was a hardcover edition in a remaindered bookshop
for only a fiver-a bargain.
The final
significant piece in the jigsaw was an increasing obsession on my part with the
music and life of Bob Dylan. In every book I read about Dylan there seemed to
be a reference to Elvis along the way-maybe not to a massive extent but he was
still there, somewhere always in the background.
With these three
things falling together, I came to understand something that had eluded me for
so long. There’s not much point in explaining it anymore; the hows and why’s-it
can simply be put into four words.
Elvis is The
King.
extracted from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod" available here as a Kindle e book
and here in paperback
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